Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

Elon Musk's xAI has apologized after its Grok generative chat-bot started spouting baseless conspiracy theories about White genocide in response to unrelated questions.

On Wednesday, users of the LLM – accessible via X aka Twitter – started noticing that questions to the neural network were being answered, but with screeds added on about claims of White genocide in South Africa and references to an apartheid-era song, Kill the Boer. As you can see below, it didn't take much to trigger the bot.

The situation appears to have been resolved, in that it's stopped auto-banging on about White genocide, although some users can apparently still get Grok ranting by asking the bot to "jork it." On Friday, xAI issued a statement claiming the bot had been fiddled with by someone without permission ...